Saturday, June 4, 2011

Ethics, Law and Motivation

In order to discuss the differences between an unethical act and
an illegal act, and motivation for these acts, we need to understand
the definition of the words themselves. Dictionary.com (n.d.) defines
ethical as “in accordance with principles of conduct that are
considered correct, especially those of a given profession or group”
while the term legal is defined as “established by or founded upon
law; lawful” Dictionary.com (n.d.). Finally, motivation is defined
as “desire to do; interest or drive; incentive or inducement”
Dictionary.com (n.d.).
From the definitions given above, it is clear that in order for an
act or action to be considered unethical, it has to contradict the
personal judgement of what is considered to be correct. Whereas
illegal act is an act violating an official law or regulation. For
example, in software development domain, when an employer forces
employees (software developers) to develop only a partially
functioning software in order to increase profitability of the
company, while not illegal it could be considered as unethical act.
On the other hand, when an European Union (EU) based hosting company
stores personal records of its clients on servers in North America,
as a backup or disaster recovery site, with the same or stricter
security controls in place, although it does not violate any ethical
principals it is forbidden by official EU rules (European Commission
of Justice, 2009). In practice data transfer to non-EU entities is
possible if the same core principals of data protection are provided
to the personal records of the individuals. Furthermore, EU and the
Department of Commerce (DoC) have developed a framework – Safe
Harbor, to bridge between privacy approaches and streamline the trade
between the EU and US (export.gov,
2011).

Moreover, when discussing motivations
to conduct an illegal act and unethical act, there is a clear
distinction between the two. Since ethical behaviour is dictated by
personal principals, an individual would have no desire to conduct an
unethical act. On the other hand, illegal acts as shown in the
example above, not always contradict personal ethical principals,
therefore an incentive or gain (financial, personal, etc.) could be a
driver for an illegal act.

As a continuation of this topic, it
would be beneficial to examine the potential conflict between
corporate policies, as oppose to provincial or federal laws which
were discussed above, and personal ethical principals. As highlighted
by Verizon Business 2008 data breach investigations report, in
finance and tech industries, 39 and 39 percent respectively of
breaches originated from internal sources – internal employees
(Wade H. Baker at al, 2008).